So my question is really quite pedantic, but I'm looking to update Codex so I wanted to ask you guys - is there a reason why we wouldn't want to just encourage posts_per_page across the board, eventually deprecating numberposts? Or am I missing some critical insight here?

1 Answer
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In my opinion, deprecating numberposts would not make sense, as numberposts is used to query x amount of posts, whilst posts_per_page is used to denote how many posts per page are being shown during pagination. If you were to deprecate numberposts in favor of simply posts_per_page, then pagination would not exist.

ie:

"numberposts" => 50, "posts_per_page" => 10

a total of 50 posts to query, 10 posts per page, giving 5 pages of 10 posts each.

removal of numberposts:

"posts_per_page" => 50

a total of 50 posts to query, 50 posts per page (since it copies the value of numberposts to posts_per_page), giving 1 page of 50 posts and no pagination.

Let me know if I'm just reiterating what you're already aware of, and I'm just slightly confused by the question.

I agree that they sound like they should do different things, but if you study the code, they actually don't! I actually prefer "numberposts" in some cases, like where the notion of "pages" doesn't really come into play - like some output in a sidebar widget, for instance.
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Tom AugerApr 24 '12 at 18:01